


Ah taci, ingiusto core

by Casia_sage



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, An Exploration of Morse and Susan's Relationship, Break Up, Character Study, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Isolation, POV Second Person, Past Abuse, Recovery, Social Anxiety, This Is Very Much Me Venting, Unreliable Narrator, Victim Blaming, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:59:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21619240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casia_sage/pseuds/Casia_sage
Summary: You love her, you love her, you love her and you never stopped. Why do people who love each other leave each other? (Answer: she never did).A small, vent-y exploration of Morse and Susan's relationship."Ah taci, ingiusto core" ("Ah quiet, unjust heart").
Relationships: Endeavour Morse & Fred Thursday, Susan Fallon/Endeavour Morse
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23





	Ah taci, ingiusto core

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: this has pretty heavy prose and was mostly just a vent-fic. A lot of this is based on my personal experience, and it's important that I get across that I'm not trying to frame Susan as being totally evil and abusive. She's just a person, same as Morse, and they all made mistakes.

The first room that you ever believed was your own was cold and neat and sterile. It wasn’t so much _your_ room, as much as it was a model of what you must be. Cold and neat and sterile. Your mother’s gone now and you must fit in the mold of what is expected in this house. But there is a coldness--a prickling feeling beneath it all. _You’re all alone._

You go to University when you’re 18 because, though you can’t articulate it, your soul screams at you that something isn’t right (now it only mutters). You’re young and hopeful and maybe a little broken. Then you see a girl from across the room and your heart stops. It doesn’t restart until years later.

You’re 19 and you feel like you’re being martyred; you’re 27 and you’ve realized that you’ve martyred yourself. Some perfect image of what a boy like you should be: spitting blood and bearing rose petals, soft and pink and always aching for someone else’s sake. 

You’re 20 and you think that you need to save her from herself (you never thought about who's going to save you). You’re 20 and you realize that suffering can be religious if you do it right.

But you are wild and complicated and sometimes you don’t even understand yourself. That is why you are deeply afraid that no one will ever be capable of loving you. 

The truth is that you loved her and you love her, so you refuse to believe that she could’ve been cruel in her love. The way that she told you how she loved you more than anything in the world, how she spoke of how she’d kiss you, how she’d hold you, though she never did. She only ever talked about it. You’d write her poems and call her your muse or something else equally as beautiful and untouchable, and she’d smile. That is how that year went: you were the poet. You spoke, you yearned, you loved. She was the muse. Full of temptations and love that wasn’t made for a boy like you. She holds your very heart in her hand and runs with it; you spend the rest of the year chasing after her, trying to get her heart (you never thought to get yours back too, and now she’s halfway across the world with both of your hearts, and you’re sitting in your flat next to a silent phonograph, with ten unsent letters on the desk and a thousand unwritten ones in that empty space in your chest). 

You love too fully, with every piece of yourself. In her, you found the world. 

You say that you love the way that the minimal light contours her cheekbones. Your hands are in her hair, and hers are wrapped around your ribs. Your sharp hip bones are pressed against hers. You wish that you had told her in that moment how you love the sound of her laugh, the way her eyes crinkle. How much you love the warmth of her body next to you. That’s what you miss the most now. Not the way the shadows fell on her face, or how her pale eyes were like the moon. The real things. You wish most that you hadn’t just treated her like a piece of poetry, but that’s all she ever wanted you to see of her, not any of the messy bits. 

Sometimes your breath stops. You can’t breathe and everything is too much and completely indescribable. She hates you in those moments. “Stop it, They’re staring at you,” she says. That’s what she says to you. Just like they say in your head. You don’t leave your room for three days after that. 

“None of them like you. You must look like such a mess to them. A freak. That’s all you’ll ever be. You’re not like them. You’re not like _us._”

“Do you hate me?” she asks. “Do you hate me? Do you hate me? Do you hate me? Do you hate me?” You don’t know. “Why do you hate me?” Because she makes you hate yourself. No. Because everything she says is true. You pretend to hate her because you hate yourself. Every cruel word she says worsens the ache in your chest. Everything she thinks you are is only what you’ve been scared you are. That nothingness that consumes you is what you _deserve._

You want her to stop asking why those words upset you. Stop. Stop, stop, stop. Stop asking why you feel the way you do. You need her to stop asking you what you feel. You don’t know. Maybe you feel nothing. Nothingness has become a real emotion in and of itself, not just the absence of emotion. Your final words will be cries, pleads to not be forgotten. We will not forget (forgive) our martyr. 

You love her, you love her, you love her and you never stopped. Why do people who love each other leave each other? (Answer: she never did). 

It’s not your fault that you couldn’t make her love you. You don’t even pretend to believe that. 

You have to believe that you deserved it, or you have to make yourself the kind of person that deserved it. Otherwise you cannot understand why you just accepted it. You know inside of you that the light in her eyes was never going to guide you home, and deeper down, you know that you’ve always known that. But love is not something that you can think through or understand or analyze. It is either there or it is not. But you can’t remember if she ever loved you or if you pretended that she did because you were so desperate to be part of her universe. You could never tell her “no”. Not to anything. Not even to things that you didn’t want. That’s not love, is it? If it is, maybe you don’t want any part in it. Maybe this all started when you were young and you watched everything you had waste away and then be buried six feet under the ground. Maybe it started when you were told that you cannot love the dead, only the living, but the people who were still living were brutal and unforgiving and bitter. Maybe that’s what you grew up believing love should be. People who hurt you, but you don’t even have to forgive them, because you were never even upset. Maybe you don’t know what the fuck love is supposed to be at all (you are a force--not of nature. Of grief. Of anguish). 

Her lips were like sugar; sweetened by your agony, like rot on fruit. (That is not love, that is a parasite. But you feel dirty for thinking that about her because you will not be a victim of the girl you love). 

Your world falls apart when you catch her kissing another boy, and you pretend that it wasn’t already falling apart before that. You don’t speak to anyone for a week after that, and you think that maybe she got what she wanted anyway: to rip you away from everyone else that could possibly care about you, so that when she leaves, _you’re all alone._

Sometimes you wonder if you only ever loved her for the warmth of it. 

The world is often simpler than you make it out to be. Sometimes you are a good man. Sometimes you are not. 

You’re 27 and you’ve already got a knife wound in your side and a bullet in your hip. But you’ve looked men in the eye, knowing that they follow the same truth as you (sometimes they are good men. Sometimes they are not), and locked them away anyways (sometimes the world is kind. Sometimes, often, it is not). 

You’re 27 and you’ve found gentleness in your guv’nor, somehow, and you should be forced to rethink your ideas on what love is, but you aren’t. You just stand there clueless, wide-eyed, and afraid as he guides you through the too-loud streets.

He doesn’t talk about holding you, like she used to, he just gathers you in his arms and hold you until you can breathe again. He doesn’t reprimand you for your many faults. About forgetting to eat and for getting in trouble too often, for being too prickly and distant and difficult. He just eyes you disapprovingly and takes you home; let’s you sleep on his sofa and wraps you in his coat, and when you wake up, there’s food waiting for you. And you never speak about it. Nor do you the second time. Without any questions, he tries to mend what she’s broken, and what you’ve broken yourself. 

You haven’t forgiven her yet, because you’re not entirely sure that you’ve gotten to the point where you can even blame her, but slowly and achingly and bloodily, you are _healing_.

**Author's Note:**

> One of these days I'll post an Endeavour fic with like...an actual plot instead of 3k of weird introspective bullshit that I wrote in 20 minutes. Thanks for reading!


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